Creating a relevant pipeline to emerging jobs from education to industry
Workforce Development
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Key is a convener with industry and education
Key Innovative Solutions is committed to bridging the gap between industry and education. Key removes obstacles, creating a smooth pipeline from school districts, technical colleges, state colleges and universities into relevant career opportunities, meeting the workforce demands of industry.
As we have seen in this past year, the anticipated unemployment crisis in 2030 of jobs lost to automation and artificial intelligence has been sped up, due to COVID-19, to the year 2025. That is this year's 8th graders. That crisis can be avoided through upskilling of the current workforce.
It is imperative for education to partner closely with industry in order to equip students in secondary and post-secondary with current and relevant credentials and certifications, along with robust pre-apprenticeship and apprenticeship programs. Industry must drive the dialogue as to what is needed in a well-equipped workforce. It is with this partnership that we can avert the projected unemployment crisis as individuals are skilled and upskilled to meet the dynamics that are ever-changing within each and every industry.
The Future of Jobs Report - World Economic Forum, October 2020
Preparing a workforce for emerging fields
The past two years have seen a clear
acceleration in the adoption of new technologies
among the companies surveyed. The image below (Figure 18) presents a selection of technologies organized
according to companies’ likelihood to adopt
them by 2025. Cloud computing, big data and
e-commerce remain high priorities, following a
trend established in previous years. However,
there has also been a significant rise in interest
in encryption, reflecting the new vulnerabilities
of our digital age, and a significant increase in
the number of firms expecting to adopt nonhumanoid
robots and artificial intelligence, with
both technologies slowly becoming a mainstay of
work across industries.
These patterns of technological adoption vary
according to industry.
Artificial intelligence is finding the most broad adaptation among the Digital Information and Communications, Financial Services, Healthcare, and Transportation industries. Big data, the Internet of Things and Non-Humanoid Robotics are seeing strong adoption in Mining and Metals, while the Government and the Public Sector industry shows a distinctive focus on encryption. These new technologies are set to drive future growth across industries, as well as to increase the demand for new job roles and skill sets. Such positive effects may be counter-balanced by workforce disruptions.
A substantial amount of literature has indicated that technological adoption will impact workers’ jobs by displacing some tasks performed by humans into the realm of work performed by machines. The extent of disruption will vary depending on a worker’s occupation and skill set.33 Data from the Forum’s Future of Jobs Survey shows that companies expect to re-structure their workforce in response to new technologies (Figure 20). In particular, the companies surveyed indicate that they are also looking to transform the composition of their value chain (55%), introduce further automation, reduce the current workforce (43%) or expand their workforce as a result of deeper technological integration (34%), and expand their use of contractors for task specialized work (41%).
The Future of Jobs - World Economic Forum Report, October 2020